Five people have been trapped about 200 feet underground at the Grand Canyon Caverns since Sunday in Peach Springs, Arizona, officials said.
The group became stranded at the tourist site after an elevator malfunctioned, according to Jon Paxton, a spokesperson for the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office.
“Yesterday five folks were exiting the caverns when the elevator stopped working. Believing it was an electrical problem, a generator was brought in. It’s not an electrical problem. It’s a mechanical problem,” Paxton told CNN.
Officials do not know how long it will take to fix the elevator, and the group is staying in a motel suite located at the bottom of the the tourist attraction, which sits about 65 miles northeast of Kingman, Paxton said.
“The Cavern put the people up in a motel, and there is a small restaurant at the bottom, and the motel is working to make the people as comfortable as possible while they are down there.”
There are approximately 21 flights of stairs leading to the bottom with platforms and ladders, Paxton said. However, some of the people trapped do not have the physical capabilities to climb the stairs.
“We have a search and rescue team standing by as well as a hoisting apparatus to lift people out if the repairs take longer than expected or if people are not comfortable staying down there,” Paxton said.
CNN reached out to The Grand Canyon Caverns for additional details.
The Grand Canyon Caverns is a tourist attraction that allows visitors to tour inside an ancient underground cave, dine and stay in a motel, according to its website.
NEW YORK (AP) — A new study suggests Neanderthals formed small, tightknit communities where females may have traveled to move in with their mates.
The research used genetic sleuthing to offer a rare snapshot of Neanderthal family dynamics — including a father and his teenage daughter who lived together in Siberia more than 50,000 years ago.
Researchers were able to pull DNA out of tiny bone fragments found in two Russian caves. In their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they used the genetic data to map out relationships between 13 different Neanderthals and get clues to how they lived.
“When I work on a bone or two, it’s very easy to forget that these are actually people with their own lives and stories,” said study author Bence Viola, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto. “Figuring out how they’re related to each other really makes them much more human.”
Our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, lived across Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. They died out around 40,000 years ago, shortly after our species, the Homo sapiens, arrived in Europe from Africa.
Scientists have only recently been able to dig around in these early humans’ DNA. New Nobel laureate Svante Paabo — who is an author on this latest study — published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome a little over a decade ago.
Since then, scientists have sequenced 18 Neanderthal genomes, said lead author Laurits Skov, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But it’s rare to find bones from multiple Neanderthals from the same time and place, he said — which is why these cave discoveries were so special.
“If there was ever a chance to find a Neanderthal community, this would be it,” Skov said.
The caves, located in remote foothills above a river valley, have been a rich source of materials from stone tools to fossil fragments, Viola said. With their prime view of migrating herds in the valley below, researchers think the caves might have served as a short-term hunting stop for Neanderthals.
Archaeologists excavating the caves have found remains from at least a dozen different Neanderthals, Viola said. These remains usually come in small bits and pieces — “a finger bone here, a tooth there” — but they’re enough for scientists to extract valuable DNA details.
The researchers were able to identify a couple of relatives among the group. Along with the father and daughter, there was a pair of other relatives — maybe a boy and his aunt, or a couple of cousins.
Overall, the analysis found that everyone in the group had a lot of DNA in common. That suggests that at least in this area, Neanderthals lived in very small communities of 10 to 20 individuals, the authors concluded.
But not everyone in these groups stayed put, according to the study.
Researchers looked at other genetic clues from mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down on the mother’s side, and the Y chromosome, which is passed down on the father’s side.
The female side showed more genetic differences than the male side — which means females may have moved around more, Skov said. It’s possible that when a female Neanderthal found a mate, she would leave home to live with his family.
University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved in the study, said the research was an exciting application of ancient DNA evidence, even as many questions remain about Neanderthal social structures and lifestyles.
Figuring out how early humans lived is like “putting together a puzzle where we have many, many missing pieces,” Hawks said. But this study means “somebody’s dumped a bunch more pieces on the table.”
———
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
In one of the coves in Algeria where probiotic bacteria has been found. To the right Baraa Rehamnia, guest researcher in Natuschka Lee´s research group at Umeå University. Credit: club de spéléologie et sport de montagne de Béjaïa
A research team from Umeå University, SLU and Algeria has found bacteria with a number of interesting properties in previously unexplored caves at a depth of several hundred meters in Algeria. One of these properties is the breakdown of gluten, which can therefore be of interest to people with gluten allergies. The results are published in Microbiology Spectrum.
“This study is yet another example of the fantastic potential of exciting microbes on our own planet. Despite intensive research, we have so far only managed to map a small part of all microbes found on earth,” says Natuschka Lee, researcher at the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Umeå University.
When Jules Verne wrote his novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” many people trivialized the wild fantasies surrounding the existence of life in the underworld. It took several decades before biologists began to seriously explore life underground.
Today, it is known that at least 30% of all microorganisms on earth live deep underground—under completely different conditions than the life forms on the earth’s surface, for example without sunlight and thus without plants. Research into underground life forms can give us interesting information about how life can develop in different ways on Earth and whether there can be life in the underground on other celestial bodies, such as on the planet Mars.
Caves can act as a natural gateway down to the underworld. Caves are found all over the world, but only a fraction of these have been explored. In the last decade, cave research has received a lot of interest—even in the context of space research, as some planets, such as Mars, have been found to contain many caves.
In the current study, Natuschka Lee in collaboration with Baraa Rehamnia, until recently visiting Ph.D. student from Constantine University in Algeria (who is doing her dissertation on this research topic during the summer of 2022) and Ramune Kuktaite, researcher at the Department of Plant Breeding at SLU in Alnarp, have looked for interesting characteristics of spore-forming bacteria in up till now unexplored caves at a depth of several hundred meters in Algeria.
These bacteria are closely related to the Bacillus group, a group of bacteria much studied in astrobiology due to their impressive survival abilities and which on our own planet play a major role in several different contexts, partly as pathogens, partly as beneficial microbes in both ecological and biotechnology contexts.
“For example, we found strains that can produce antimicrobial substances or that can break down gluten, a substance that can cause inflammatory reactions in the intestines of many people. The bacteria were also found to be able to tolerate the extreme conditions found in our digestive system,” says Natuschka Lee.
In the future, the researchers will investigate whether these bacteria can be of use to the biotechnology industry for, for example, gluten allergy.
Can Earth life survive on Mars?
More information:
Baraa Rehamnia et al, Screening of Spore-Forming Bacteria with Probiotic Potential in Pristine Algerian Caves, Microbiology Spectrum (2022). DOI: 10.1128/spectrum.00248-22
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A typical forecast on the moon is nowhere near cozy, temperatures range from boiling during the day to 280 below zero at night. However, according to a new study, unique features known as moon pits could offer an oasis from the rollercoaster temperatures.
To learn what it might be like inside these lunar pits, a team of planetary scientists at UCLA used thermal imaging from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and determined the temperature, at least in one of these pits, is always a consistent 63 degrees. The findings were recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and UCLA’s newsroom is calling it the discovery of year-round “sweater weather.”
One of the study authors, Tyler Horvath, a planetary science Ph.D. student at UCLA, said the pit could be the opening of a lava tube or cave and would be an ideal place to live for astronauts, offering perfect temperatures as well as protection from meteorites and radiation.
“Imagine a full day on the moon … you have 15 days of extreme hot that get up to well past the boiling point of water. And then you have 15 days of extreme cold, which is some of the coldest temperatures in the entire solar system,” Horvath said. “So being able to be in a place where you don’t have to spend energy to keep yourself warm throughout those 15 days of night is almost invaluable because during the night, if you’re trying to use solar power as your main form of getting energy, you can’t do that for 15 days.”
The UCLA research team focused on the chasm in the Sea of Tranquility or the Mare Trenquillitatis region, which is about 220 miles from where Apollo 11 landed and also an equal distance to the Apollo 17 landing site.
A cozy pixel on the moon
UCLA researchers spotted a single pixel in infrared images suggesting there are warmer spots on the Moon.NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
NASA’s LRO spacecraft is continuously orbiting the moon, taking measurements with its suite of instruments, including the Diviner Lunar Radiometer, which has been mapping the moon’s thermal emissions constantly since 2009.
UCLA Planetary Scientist David Paige is the principal investigator of the Diviner instrument and the lead author of the new study about the moon pit.
Horvath was assigned to create a 3D model of one of these interesting pits in the Mare Trenquillitatis region. During that process, the team noticed a single pixel in the infrared images that was warmer than most spots on the moon at night when temperatures plummet.
“We noticed that really quickly it was able to warm up and maintain kind of a warmer temperature than the surface usually does at night,” Horvath explained. “We’re like, ‘Oh, this might be more interesting than we thought.’”
The Japanese SELENE/Kaguya Terrain Camera and Multiband Imager captured the Moon’s ancient volcanic region called Marius Hills.NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
After rechecking the Diviner data and considering what sunlight the pit gets, the team determined the temperature of the pit floor during the day. Unfortunately, this doesn’t confirm a cave opening, but that is still the working theory about these pits formed by ancient volcanic activity.
“It was still a cool result that if there’s a cave there, it would support temperatures that are 63 Fahrenheit all the time, 24 seven every single day forever, basically,” Horvath said.
How the Trenquillitatis pit and other caverns on the moon maintain their temperature comes down to a physics concept known as a blackbody cavity, which can self-regulate to keep its temperature.
“It’s essentially a surface that is a perfect emitter of radiation and absorber of radiation,” Horvath explains.
The temperature at the bottom of the pit also depends on its position relative to the Earth and moon from the sun.
“If you’re closer to the sun, the temperature would be hotter,” Horvath said. “If you’re further from the sun, it’d be colder.”
How did lava tubes form on the moon?
Even from Earth, it’s obvious the moon has interesting features, including craters of all shapes and sizes. In 2009, the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya orbiting the moon discovered a new type of lunar feature in the form of deep chasms that researchers believe could contain caves created by collapsed lava tubes, similar to ones found on Earth.
UCLA researchers believe the Moon has lava caves similar to Devil’s Throat in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.Sergi Reboredo/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Horvath explains that billions of years ago, very intense volcanic activity and lava flows created the dark splotches we see today when we look up at the moon. The lava at the surface would cool first because it was exposed to the cold temperatures of space where the caverns below the lava still flowed.
“In some places, that lava will completely leave and will leave a hollow tube, a lava tube under the surface,” Horvath said. “These pits are kind of our ways to see that they exist, that there’s a way into them, and they could be everywhere.”
NASA describes the moon pits as “skylights” where the roof of the lava tube collapsed.
On Earth, the UCLA research team behind the study even visited a lava tube in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park known as the Devil’s Throat, which is similar in size to the Mare Trenquillitatis pit. The park is home to other lava tubes like the one pictured above that visitors can walk through.
Without physically going to the moon and rock climbing down into one of these pits, it will be hard for researchers to learn if these vast caves exist. Eventually, that might be possible because, in the next four years, NASA plans to return humans to the moon and establish a permanent base.
A stalactite formation in a Hawaiian cave system from this study with copper minerals and white microbial colonies. Despite copper being toxic to many organisms, this formation hosts a microbial community. (Credit: Kenneth Ingham)
Hundreds of years ago, the volcanic processes that created the islands of Hawaii also formed a network of underground tunnels and caves.
They’re cold, dark and full of toxic gases and minerals. So, pretty much inhospitable to most forms of life.
However, scientists have discovered these volcanic vents actually contain sprawlingly complex colonies of microbes.
These are the smallest known living organisms on Earth and we really don’t know much about them at all.
In fact, estimates suggest that 99.999 per cent of all microbe species remain unknown. As a result, some refer to these mysterious life forms as ‘dark matter’.
Yet they still make up a huge amount of Earth’s biomass.
Thick microbial mats hang under a rock ledge in steam vents that run along the Eastern Rift Zone on Hawaii Island. Image (Credit: Jimmy Saw)
What’s got the experts so interested in Hawaii’s lava caves is that the conditions there are as close as you might get to those of the Mars or other distant planets.
And if microbes can survive in these 600 – 800 year old lava tubes, we might just find some on Mars at some stage.
Researchers found that older lava caves, dating back more than 500 years, typically contained a more diverse population of microbes.
Therefore, they believe it takes a long time for these tiny little creatures to colonise the volcanic basalt. As the environment changes over the eons, so does their social structure.
When the caves are younger and still more active, they microbes colonies are closer together in terms of species.
‘This leads to the question, do extreme environments help create more interactive microbial communities, with microorganisms more dependent on each other?’ said microbiologist Rebecca Prescott from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
‘And if so, what is it about extreme environments that helps to create this?’
Green and purple biofilms and microbial mats are common in geothermally active sites on the island of Hawaii. (Credit: Stuart Donachie)
Although there’s plenty we don’t know, the scientusts suspect that competition is a stronger force in harsher environments.
‘Overall, this study helps to illustrate how important it is to study microbes in co-culture, rather than growing them alone (as isolates),’ Prescott added.
‘In the natural world, microbes do not grow in isolation. Instead, they grow, live, and interact with many other microorganisms in a sea of chemical signals from those other microbes. This then can alter their gene expression, affecting what their jobs are in the community.’
The findings of the study have been published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
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Steve Smith in a Hawaiian cave passage filled with roots of the Kaʻu district on the Island of Hawai`i. Credit: Kenneth Ingham
Centuries-Old Lava Caves of Hawaiʻi Island Contain Thousands of Unknown Bacterial Species
Higher bacterial diversity than scientists expected has been uncovered in the lava caves, lava tubes, and geothermal vents on the big island of Hawaiʻi. The findings have been reported in a new study published today (July 21, 2022) in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
This research investigates the variety and interactions within these microbial ecosystems, which illustrate how life may have existed on
“This study points to the possibility that more ancient lineages of bacteria, like the phylum Chloroflexi, may have important ecological ‘jobs,’ or roles,” said first author Dr. Rebecca D Prescott of
Thick microbial mats hang under a rock ledge in steam vents that run along the Eastern Rift Zone on Hawaiʻi Island. Credit: Jimmy Saw
The harshest conditions—the geothermal sites—were expected to have lower diversity than the more established and habitable lava tubes. While the diversity was indeed found to be lower, the team of researchers was surprised to discover that the interactions within these communities were more complex than in locations with higher diversity.
“This leads to the question, do extreme environments help create more interactive microbial communities, with microorganisms more dependent on each other?” said Prescott. “And if so, what is it about extreme environments that helps to create this?”
Since Chloroflexi, and another class called Acidobacteria, were present at nearly all of the locations, they may play essential roles in these communities. However, these were not the most abundant bacteria, and the individual communities from the different sites showed large variations in the diversity and complexity of the microbial interactions. Counterintuitively, the most abundant groups, Oxyphotobacteria and Actinobacteria, were not often ‘hub’ species, suggesting that their roles may be less important to the overall structure of the community.
More questions than answers
Since the current study was based on the partial sequencing of one gene, it cannot accurately determine the species of microbes or their ‘jobs’ in the community. Therefore, further research is needed to help reveal the individual species that are present, as well as to better understand these bacteria’s roles in the environment.
A stalactite formation in a Hawaiian cave system from this study with copper minerals and white microbial colonies. Despite the fact that copper is toxic to many organisms, this formation hosts a microbial community. Credit: Kenneth Ingham
“Overall, this study helps to illustrate how important it is to study microbes in co-culture, rather than growing them alone (as isolates),” said Prescott. “In the natural world, microbes do not grow in isolation. Instead, they grow, live, and interact with many other microorganisms in a sea of chemical signals from those other microbes. This then can alter their gene expression, affecting what their jobs are in the community.”
Beyond the insights about past, or even future, life on Mars, bacteria from volcanic environments can also be useful in understanding how microbes turn volcanic rock (basalt) into soils, as well as bioremediation, biotechnology, and sustainable resource management.
Reference: “Islands Within Islands: Bacterial Phylogenetic Structure and Consortia in Hawaiian Lava Caves and Fumaroles” by Rebecca D. Prescott, Tatyana Zamkovaya, Stuart P. Donachie, Diana E. Northup, Joseph J. Medley, Natalia Monsalve, Jimmy H. Saw, Alan W. Decho, Patrick S. G. Chain and Penelope J. Boston, 21 July 2022, Frontiers in Microbiology. DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.934708
Funding: NASA Headquarters, George Washington University
The Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii Volcano National Park, Big IslandPhoto: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)
Hawaii’s volcanic environments contain a rich array of mysterious microbes, new research this week has found. Scientists say that the islands’ lava caves and other structures created by volcanic activity have unique, diverse, and still uncharacterized communities of bacteria living inside them. The findings indicate that there is much left to learn about life in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth.
Researchers at several universities and NASA collaborated for the study, which was published Thursday in Frontiers in Microbiology. They studied samples collected from 70 sites along the Big Island of Hawaii, the largest island of the Hawaiian archipelago. These sites included caves, tubes, and fumaroles, which are openings or vents where volcanic gasses and water can escape. They analyzed and sequenced the RNA found in the samples, allowing to create a rough map of the bacterial communities living there.
A stalactite formation in a Hawaiian cave system from this study with copper minerals and white microbial colonies.Photo: Kenneth Ingham
Some of these areas, particularly those with ongoing geothermal activity, are the most inhospitable places in the world, since they are incredibly hot and filled with chemicals toxic to most living things. So the research team expected to find relatively little variety of life nestled within the sites that had these extreme conditions. Older caves and tubes that were formed over 500 years ago, the researchers found, did have greater bacterial diversity. But to their surprise, even the active geothermal vents were filled with a wide variety of bacteria. And compared to the other sites, the bacterial communities in these harsher habitats also appeared to be more complex in how they interacted with one another.
“This leads to the question, do extreme environments help create more interactive microbial communities, with microorganisms more dependent on each other?” said study author Rebecca Prescott, a researcher at the NASA Johnson Space Center and University of Hawaii, in a statement. “And if so, what is it about extreme environments that helps to create this?
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Thick microbial mats hang under a rock ledge in steam vents that run along the Eastern Rift Zone. Image: Jimmy Saw
The bacteria found in these sites also rarely overlapped, meaning that these environments seem to host their own unique microbial worlds, with at least thousands of unknown species left to be identified. One group of bacteria in particular, known as Chloroflexi, might be especially influential, though, since they were commonly found in different volcanic areas and seemed to interact with many other organisms. And it’s possible that they may be an example of a “hub species”—microbes vital to the structure and function of their communities.
“This study points to the possibility that more ancient lineages of bacteria, like the phylum Chloroflexi, may have important ecological ‘jobs,’ or roles,” said Prescott. “The Chloroflexi are an extremely diverse group of bacteria, with lots of different roles found in lots of different environments, but they are not well studied and so we don’t know what they do in these communities. Some scientists call such groups ‘microbial dark matter’—the unseen or un-studied microorganisms in nature.”
These sorts of genetic sampling studies can provide a broad view of the bacterial world found in a particular place, but not more detailed information about individual species or the roles they play in their tiny neighborhoods. So the scientists say that more research is needed to decipher the mystery of these volcanic inhabitants. In time, what we learn may be relevant to our understanding of how life began on the Earth or even on Mars, since these environments might be the closest existing analog to what the planets looked like long ago.
These twisting, subterranean caverns can be home to mysteries and tall tales and lead to pirate’s treasure or a nest of vampires — if you ever watched 1980s movies such as “The Goonies” or “The Lost Boys.”
In reality, caves have sheltered our ancestors, who left examples of their artwork and stories along shadowy walls. But early humans weren’t alone in these dwellings. A diverse range of microorganisms live inside caves around the world.
Many of these hidden, natural networks and the wonders within them remain unexplored, however, because they are dangerous and sometimes inaccessible.
Technological advances could help scientists overcome the challenges of investigating these underground systems — and beyond. In our quest to search for life outside Earth, extraterrestrial caves may just hold the evidence we’re hoping to find.
Other worlds
A robot named ReachBot may become the first explorer to crawl inside Martian caves to search for microbes.
ReachBot is a concept for a machine about the size of a toaster oven with multiple extendable arms that could help it crawl through treacherous Martian caves the way Spider-Man swings through a city.
The bot would connect to a surface rover that could provide power, analyze cave samples and relay photos back to Earth.
The ReachBot team has received funding to build and test a prototype in caves on Earth similar to what might be encountered on Mars.
Meanwhile, China’s Tianwen-1 probe has shared images from more than a year spent photographing the red planet.
Ocean secrets
The Mesoamerican Reef, the second-largest barrier reef in the world, is a bit of a superhighway for sharks, turtles and rays living in the Caribbean.
The reef, which spans more than 600 miles (965.6 kilometers) from Mexico to Honduras, provides food and a rich habitat for marine life. But the endangered creatures that use this reef to navigate north and south can swim right into danger and fall prey to illegal fishing practices.
Now, sharks using this route have new unlikely allies in the local communities along the reef — fishers who are determined to protect the vital ecosystem.
Meanwhile, researchers recently stumbled on a different threat to great white sharks living off the coast of South Africa: a pair of shark-killing orcas.
We are family
Fossils of early human ancestors found inside South Africa’s Sterkfontein Caves are 1 million years older than previously suspected.
The fossils belong to the genus Australopithecus, an ancient hominin initially thought to have lived 2 million to 2.6 million years ago. Now, researchers believe these ancient ancestors were around 3.4 million to 3.6 million years ago.
This new date makes the cave fossils older than the famed fossil Lucy,a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis who was found in Ethiopia and lived 3.2 million years ago.
Initially, it was thought that Australopiths from South Africa evolved from those living in East Africa, like Lucy — but the new dates turn that theory on its head. Now, researchers hope to discover who the older common ancestor was for these two ancient populations.
Across the universe
Soon, we’ll be able to see the universe in an entirely new way.
On July 12, astronomers will share the first high-resolution, full-color images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. One of those “is the deepest image of our universe that has ever been taken,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.
The images are expected to show how galaxies interact and grow, provide a glimpse inside the violent life cycle of stars and even a colorful peek inside the spectrum of an exoplanet — or how light wavelengths reveal characteristics of other worlds.
Fantastic creatures
Giant pandas have a taste for bamboo, but it hasn’t always been the case. Ancestors of the rare bears had a much more diverse diet that even included meat.
If you’ve ever looked closely at a panda’s paw, you’ll notice it has an extra finger. Analysis of a fossilized panda ancestor’s “false thumb” from 6 million years ago, found in Yunnan province in China, pinpointed when this bamboo preference began, according to a new study.
Pandas evolved the digit to help them hold on to the plant’s woody stems.
The fossil also revealed a mystery about the thumb, which turned out to be an evolutionary compromise for the giant pandas.
Discoveries
You’ve got to see these:
— A carnivorous plant that captures subterranean creatures has been found on Borneo. It’s the first pitcher plant known to go underground in search of prey.
— Miners were digging for gold in Canada’s Klondike when they unearthed a “near complete” mummified baby woolly mammoth that died more than 30,000 years ago.
— A NASA orbiter has spotted a surprising new double crater on the moon. The cavity formed when a mystery rocket crashed into the lunar surface on March 4.
Like what you’ve read? Oh, but there’s more. Sign up here to receive in your inbox the next edition of Wonder Theory, brought to you by CNN Space and Science writer Ashley Strickland, who finds wonder in planets beyond our solar system and discoveries from the ancient world.
As other missions, including that of NASA’s InSight lander, have shown, drilling down through the surface of planets like Mars is tough — a little too tough to get more than a few inches into the subsurface.
Recently, the Curiosity rover measured total organic carbon, a necessary ingredient in the molecules of life, in Martian rocks for the first time. But it doesn’t prove that life ever existed on Mars, because carbon can also be produced by nonliving sources.
New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life.
Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.
Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms.But caves are dangerous — and since we’ve never peered inside a Martian cave, it’s difficult to know what to expect.
Before humans land on Mars and explore its subsurface, a group of scientists want to send ReachBot — a robot designed to crawl and climb through extraterrestrial caves.
A spelunking robot
The idea for ReachBot was born in 2018 when Marco Pavone, director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at Stanford University, and his students were brainstorming concepts for a Martian cave explorer.
They knew the robot would need to be able to grab anchor points so it could move without falling — and if it couldn’t find enough anchor points, it wouldn’t get very far.
One of his students suggested the idea of a small robot with extendable arms that reach out like measuring tape, which could be used the same way Spider-Man slings webs to help him navigate the skyline of New York City.
The robot concept is between the size of a basketball and a toaster oven and covered in extendable booms equipped with spiny grippers that could grab objects and grasp or push off the steep, rocky surfaces of Martian caves. It would be able to anchor itself and crawl across long distances.
When the robot’s booms aren’t needed, they roll up to stay out of the way.
Pavone, who is also associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, and his students arrived at the idea of a robot with extendable booms. They created a proposal to submit to NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which funds visionary concepts in the field of space robotics that could transform future missions.
The ReachBot concept received funding for Phase I, which the team used to conduct a round of studies that proved the concept was a feasible one, Pavone said.
Now, ReachBot has received funding for Phase II.The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out ReachBot in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California. These tests will determine how ReachBot could be used for future exploration.
Exploring beneath Mars
If ReachBot becomes its own mission, it will likely rely on a larger, more capable robot — like a rover — to access the caves it will explore. The rover will deliver ReachBot to the cave entrance or drop it off at a cliff face, which ReachBot would be able to scale.
ReachBot will likely be equipped with cameras, microscopes and a remote sensing method called LIDAR. But instruments require power and add weight, in addition to the power and communication system the robot will need.
The team envisions that ReachBot will be tethered to the surface-bound rover, which can provide power and act like a communications relay, said Stephanie Newdick, a doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University’s School of Engineering.
In addition to sending data to the rover, ReachBot may also have a conveyor belt system that allows it to collect samples and dispatch them to the surface. The rover will be larger and have instruments that can analyze the samples in detail, Newdick said.
Any initial findings from ReachBot can determine the next step for follow-up missions.
“Caves are risky environments, but they’re scientifically interesting,” Newdick said. “Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area.”
Future destinations
Martian caves are just one possible opportunity for a robot like ReachBot. Pavone sees the potential for these robots to operate alongside humans in a place like the International Space Station, handling some tasks so astronauts can make better use of their time.
The Gateway, a planned lunar outpost that will exist between Earth and the moon, won’t be crewed all the time like the space station. Robots like ReachBot could perform maintenance and upkeep, Newdick said. ReachBot could also crawl inside of lunar caves that may serve as a resource for astronauts exploring the moon.
In the future, the team believes that ReachBot could be customizable depending on its destination, influencing the design choices like its size and number of extendable arms, Pavone said.
The ends of ReachBot’s arms could also be equipped with scientific instruments that can go inside tiny cracks and crevices where a robot wouldn’t fit.
With so many capabilities, the team sees their creation as a way to further exploration across our solar system, going places where humans cannot yet tread.
When you think of snails, sharp jagged teeth are not usually what comes to mind. But you might have to reconsider because these squishy mollusks have terrifying lickity-bits when you look close enough under the microscope.
Snails use their weird-as-heck toothed-tongues called a radula to lick through all sorts of surfaces to feed, including grinding through rocks. While these ‘teeth’ are one of nature’s toughest materials, they’re still often softer than the surfaces where their food is, and the way they’re used to ‘punch’ through surfaces causes them to wear out quickly. To compensate, snails can grow several new rows of ‘teeth’ each day.
The teeth arrays, which sit on a flexible muscular organ, can be quite distinct between species, making them important identification features.
Spekia zonata radula under SEM. (Stanislav N. Gorb)
For example, the radula in the scanning electron micrograph above belongs to a Spekia zonata, a species of freshwater snail from Lake Tanganyika in Africa. Compare that to the radula of an unspecified carnivorous land snail from East Africa seen below.
(National Museum Wales/Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A new species of snail recently discovered in Spain is no exception, possessing rows upon rows of short but very pointy bits, which you can see below.
These freaky-mouthed mollusks were discovered tucked away in Iberian Peninsula caves. In fact, it’s incredible researchers found them at all: The snails are only a few millimeters in size and fairly transparent.
Also exciting? These caves seem to contain an abundance of snail diversity.
“We succeeded in collecting 57 gastropod populations from various caves,” said zoologist Adrienne Jochum from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany.
Analyzing these snails’ morphology and genetics, University of Bern malacologist Jeannette Kneubühler and colleagues concluded that the new species, along with some previously identified species, belonged to a whole new genus which they called Iberozospeum.
Shells from different species of snails discovered in the Spanish caves. (Jochum et al. Org. Divers. Evol. 2021)
The team suspects this southern peninsula of Europe is home to so many different snail species because it served as a major refuge during the Pleistocene ice age.
The new species, Iberozospeum costulatum, has two-pronged teeth (c and d below), and they look clearly different from other local species, containing smaller but more teeth in each row.
Radula from different species for comparison with extra close-ups (right). (Jochum et al. Org. Divers. Evol. 2021)
“This ‘radula’ is used for grazing and sifting through the cave mud for food particles,” said Jochum, explaining in the paper with colleagues that the snails likely evolved differently due to differences in the substrates of the caves they were found in, such as the density of the mud.
Research from earlier this year on the biomechanics of snail teeth supports this idea.
“The teeth of species from some habitats are significantly harder than those from others, which shows how strongly the mechanical properties of the radula correlate with the properties of the substrate and food,” said University of Hamburg zoologist Wencke Krings at the time.
With more than 80,000 species of snail worldwide on land and in the water, there are probably far stranger toothed-tongues out there.
The new species was described in Organisms Diversity & Evolution.
